SOME CURIOUS WILLS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXV, Issue 1131, 9 August 1913, Page 4

SOME CURIOUS WILLS.

Napoleon’s will had this spiteful passage : “I die prematurely, assassinated by the English oligarchy.” He left 10,000 francs to Cantillion, who was tried for attempting to assassinate the Duke of Wellington, “Cantillion had as much right to assassinate that oligarchist as the latter had to send me to perish on the rocks of St. Helena.” The will of Rabelais contained a characteristic clause ;—“I have no available property, I owe a great deal ; the rest I give to the poor.”

The wife of a clergyman, called upon to render an inventory of her husband’s estate reported that the major part of his estate was invested in heavenly securities, the value of which had been variously declared in this world, and highly taxed by the various churches, and never realised. Then followed a list of some of his good deeds, none of which could be realised on a cash basis. He was not a teetotal testator who left to his nurse in a hospital for banishing a pink monkey from the foot of his bed, and the same sum to the cook who removed snakes from his broth. Neither was the Berlin gentleman who left instructions that his friends who followed his hearse should take turns to roll a barrel of beer after it, and they were to consume it at the grave over his remains. In a codicil of his will a fund was left, the interest ot which was to be expended in securing weekly a quarter of a ton of Bavarian beer to the frequenters of a certain hostelry. As soon as all the participants had passed away, the fund was to go to a foundling hospital. A cynical old man in a western town of America left his property to that man in the community who could prove himself a Christian. As nobody in his neighbourhood corresponded with the definition, the property went to the legal heirs.